Thank you. A key like this is always appreciated :D. Great work Liam, too, I love the interface.
Could it be made accessible to users as well? Or would collect keys on some gamingonlinux webpage be a good idea? Something like a pool with a giveaway (or randomized key exchange) once in a while. I have lots of key from various humble bundles... ;)

Now, onto the topic of the game: it looks great, and that's a nice gesture from the developer. I'll try it out, and spread the word if I like it (as I always do, anyway).

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Deponia. I started playing it again during an internet outage that lasted more than 12 hours. It's quite fun, and I am enjoying this point-and-click adventure game as the first in a long time. Plus, no internet=no cheating. It's way harder, but I finished chaos on Deponia that way. I'm now onto the third opus, but I'm still torn on the main character, Rufus. He's not your standard hero; he can even be quite despicable at some times. But he can also be kind and likeable at others. I'm waiting to finish the series to formalize my opinion, though.

Other than that, I've been enjoying some garry's mod with some friends (playing some prop hunt, murder, hide and seek and others while in a vocal chat can be hilarious). I still think a lot of mods are of quite low quality and could be improved substantially. People are getting lots of error (the big, flashing, in-game giant error models) from unknown (to them) player models, weapons, cars, props, etc when I'm hosting, plus extremely long waiting times due to having to download lots of (unneeded) stuff from my computer. A lot of improvements can be made there (I also miss the small icons jumping around when downloading stuff, that was more useful than the progress bar that fills over and over, as it gave an idea of the overall progress). So, a mixed bag for that one, but it's still fun (when we can finally connect!).

That's about all, I haven't been playing *that* much recently, as I'm trying to balance it with work, social life, and sleep :P

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Quoting: chepatiOther than The Talos Principle, is there another game (Steam or GOG hosted) I can try now, not in the future, that has a working Vulkan renderer? I just set up Vulkan on my PC (NVidia card) and want to verify that it works. It's akin to learning to play the piano, without the piano, at the moment :-)

Well, DOTA 2 has a Vulkan renderer as well, and I think that's all for now. (There are some games that use the experimental Unity Vulkan renderer, I think, but I don't know which ones, and that's still experimental).

Now, I really like Stardock games. I hope they will start porting them!

I wouldn't mind a wine port for their older games as well. Sins of A Solar Empire runs quite well with it, if I recall correctly.
Could you ask them in a follow-up, Liam? I guess I could also do it myself...

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Invert gravity, and you're off to very bad thing.
Invert electromagnetism, and you'll have your limbs splitting off. At least you may still have planets and stars...
But that's nothing compared to what happens if you Invert the strong force...

And that's just talking about forces.
There are some theories that proclaim that our universe works that way, with these constants, because it makes life more likely, thus more likely for us to be sitting into it.

But that was nitpicking, I'll grant you that. The game looks gorgeous wand the color scheme reminds me a bit of no man's sky. It sounds quite relaxing, I'll probably check it out once I finish my current backlog.

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Quoting: ArdjeIn the FortressCraft Evolved forum, a linux guy was asking about why fortresscraft demanded 400MB/s throughput on his SSD. While he did not notice any slow downs he was wondering about that.
Turns out he had no swap partition. So after adding the swap his SSD almost went silent.
So even if you are on SSD, always, *always* use a swap partition. The swap is used to swap out not frequently used anonymous allocated memory. Every bash you start, any program linked to gcc will start out initializing memory it will never use.
In his case, his anonymous memory usage (i.e. the memory used by the game) made the kernel continously page in the static game data at a rate of 400MB. Adding swap made it possible to swap out a large part of the almost static allocation of unused memory.

There are a few things I didn't understand in your post:
1. Without a swap file or partition, how could the kernel page to disk (aka swap)?
2. Why would a swap partition reduce swapping to disk?

The only thing that could reduce it is to create a swap partition on an other disk, delete the swap partition or decrease "vm.swappiness".
Interesting read: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/do-we-really-need-swap-modern-systems [External Link]

Of course, every use case is different.
I keep 4 gigs of swap in case my system needs to page some background apps.

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Pffeeew... my very recent upgrade to 8GB was definitely a good thing. It was just becoming too unplayable. But I bit the bullet and tried some "AMD-only" DDR2, which worked just fine (although it seems slower than my former one).
I lost a few FPS in some games, but it's nice not to leave with swap's damocles sword. I don't mind background apps being moved to swap (that's what it's for), but not games that are in the foreground.

I think we definitely need an easier way to configure zram and zswap.

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Nice review, I love rally games. Unfortunately, I tend to suck at Dirt (or anything codemaster). Maybe those realistic sims aren't for me?
I will practice on Grid before getting this one.

@Liam, I love how you followed the instructions a bit too literally on this one:
https://youtu.be/QdOHlQ8Qbkg?t=42 [External Link]

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Quoting: skinnyrafWith Vulkan becoming mainstream, SteamVR about to be released and the next Debian stable release round the corner, can we expect a new SteamOS release and a new push for Steam Machines soon?

SteamOS releases are pretty much in sync with the Debian releases. They already push "experimental" (SteamOS-dedicated) packages, such as their radv build. So, I wouldn't expect a brand new SteamOS release, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did a new SteamOS push in a few months (or 1-2 years), as it looks like they keep pressuring some publishers a bit.

Wait and see. And participate, of course :)

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Quoting: LeopardSome people say Blender is a very good editing program,which covered with rendering software id.

No, Blender is a very good operating System, just like Emacs :P

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Quoting: STiAT@Shmerl is right, game developers could have perfectly well built their own shader disk cache.

Looking at the patch, if it is really essential for many games, I really wonder why it wasn't implemented earlier. Maybe they just had too many other issues to fix, but this patch is .. pretty simple. Or maybe they assumed that games would do their caches on their own anyway (I'm sure Croteam does this "because they can" :p).

Oh, don't worry, it took more than one patch :)
Those patches have been sitting on the mailing list for a long time (2014, IIRC), and only recently did the developers pick them up. I guess they had other priorities, such as feature enabling and performance improvements. This is mot strictly speaking a performance improvement, but it can reduce loading times and stuttering (only in a few special games in the latter).

However, this is only a GLSL/TGSI cache, not an actual binary cache, if I read this correctly. That means there might be some more room for improvements here. The one for radeonsi is coming a bit latter, I don't think it is planned ATM for R600g.

As for rocket league, most of my problems (including loading time, audio problems, etc) were solved recently. It might be due to an update or to me upgrading from 4GB of RAM to 8. I think it definitely made a difference for the sound, since I get a lot less garbage out of my speakers since this RAM upgrade (tip for PulseAudio users).

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